With tomorrow’s release of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, I’m proud to unleash my latest art for Dean and all my pals at UbiSoft. Since we focused on protagonist Rex Colt for the previous art, we all wanted to do something with the bad guys. And who better than the Omega Force?

UbiSoft really cut me loose on this one, letting me do basically whatever I wanted. Scan lines, pink wireframes, lightning, LED glows… man, everything I love. I even managed to sneak in a silhouette of Outpost #31, the base in my favorite horror movie THE THING. Don’t even think my dudes at Ubi caught that one. Heh heh.

I’m extremely proud to show the work I’ve been doing for UbiSoft in support of their upcoming release, FAR CRY 3: BLOOD DRAGON. Me and the team at UbiSoft have been carving this stuff out for the past 8 months or so and having a great time the entire way. The game is super 80’s movie inspired, stealing cues from genre action films and VHS culture, so as you can imagine I was ALL OVER this thing. As the materials were linked online over the past month, a few keen-eyed nerds spotted a potential Signalnoise influence, well I can finally say that you were right.

We started off by designing the main logo for the game, seen above on the posters. Chrome letters and pink paint, we knew what we wanted right off the bat so I got to it. The posters were the biggest deal, and had me doing sketches and comps as we figured out where things would land to compliment the game aesthetic and all the awesome crap we loved as kids. When you have a client writing back saying stuff like “MORE FUCKING LIGHTNING!”, you know you fell in with a great crowd. I pulled out the Struzan-inspired techniques and got to it.

I should also point out, that’s one of my favorite action stars in there, Michael Biehn. You’ll remember him from TERMINATOR, ALIENS and THE ABYSS. He’s the star of the game and it was amazing to use his likeness in this piece. I was shaking as I built that poster.

That video was created by the team at UbiSoft and… wow, it just blew my face clean off. 80s animation, VCR tracking, so good. I didn’t have anything to with the trailer and I saw it for the first time when it was launched yesterday. I just needed to include it here out of pure love. The best game ad I’ve ever seen. So proud of my pals at UbiSoft.

There will be more to come as UbiSoft and I plot more goodies for FAR CRY 3: BLOOD DRAGON (which launches May 1, I believe). A giant shout-out to my pals Jason Eisener for linking me to this amazing project, and to my new partner in ’80s crime, Dean Evans for keeping me laughing and inspired the entire time.

Here is my Green Lantern power battery illustration as an animated GIF to display the importance of texture and lighting.

To do the style seen in my recent work I always build my base shapes in Illustrator first before moving into Photoshop. Illustrator allows me to get really precise with the shapes and colour, making sure those bezier points are working for me. But the texture and lighting work in Photoshop is what really brings these otherwise flat illustrations to life.

The first frame of the GIF is my flat vectors (and a bit of brush masking), and the second is with all the effects turned on.

I can’t talk about any project details (game industry NDA stuff), but I’ll just leave this right here.

EDIT: Yep, this was an April Fools gag that I put together this weekend. Most of you got wise to it pretty early. To those who thought it might be the real deal, whoops! My apologies to Bill Watterson who probably never saw this thing anyway. But hey, gotta be polite.

To the marketing people at Sony… don’t get any ideas.

About

James White is a visual artist, designer and speaker living in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada. He makes posters and all kinds of cool stuff. Read more